Living Room Irish premiere will be unique

Shane Meadows collects his award Best Music Film prize for Stone Roses documentary Made Of Stone at the 2014 NME Awards (Image: Yui Mok/PA Wire)

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Tonight (Fri) the Button Factory will host a unique event in which cult filmakers and musician’s collide.

In 2007, acclaimed director Shane Meadows, best known for his film This Is England, released a documentary about his best friend, down-on-his-luck musician Gavin Clark.

Clark was the lead vocalist with seminal trip-hop act Unkle and the driving force behind folksters Clayhill, while he has also provided the soundtrack to most of Meadows’ film output.

When Clark was dropped from his record deal, his lifelong pal Meadows was determined to get him back on his feet.

Gavin Clark told the Beat: “I basically just got dropped from my label. Shane came over and he was like ‘I’m not having that, we’re going to make a documentary about you.’

“This was my second record label and then I got dropped. I was looking for jobs and kind of wondering what I was going to do, because I can’t do anything else apart from write and sing.

“We went to the BFI and we went to Warped Films and we got some money together to make this documentary called the Living Room.

“The film is about friendship really. I think that’s ultimately what it’s really about it. It’s about the fact that he was trying to get me out of a bad place.

“Because I was in a bad place, I wanted to give up at that moment in time. I was through. I’d been offered a managers job at a Pizza Hut and it was like, f**k that.

“Shane was like ‘You’re not doing that. It’d be like Bob Dylan doing pizzas. I’m not having it.’ That’s sort of where the film started.”

Tonight will see the Irish premier of the documentary, followed by a rare live performance from Clark.

The 40 minute film is a thought-provoking visual accompaniment to the release of Clarks’ highly regarded album ‘Beautiful Skeletons’.

The record features songs of Clark’s which he recorded with Meadows over a 20 year period, which the director collected and put together.

Meadows once said of his friend’s work: “Gavin Clark is the reason I gave up on my band and on any hopes of a career in music when I was 17 years of age.

“I heard him play one day in a friend’s kitchen in Uttoxeter, and the second he sang, I quit. The songs may be spread out over 20 years, but they are bound together by their simplicity, their honesty and most of all his voice. It’s peerless and so is Gavin.”

Also showing at the screening is Meadows’ first short film, a Northern Soul, which marked the beginning of he and Clark’s creative partnership.

It tells the story of Mike Sherbet, a lonely young man obsessed with American wrestling with the implausible dream of competing against his heroes on the British wrestling circuit.

Clark will be also be accompanied by up-and-coming English act The Leisure Society during his performance.

The Living Room premiers at the Button Factory, Dublin tonight, Friday July 18. Doors open at 7pm, tickets cost €20.